People Keep Railing Against E-Bikes – Bike Snob NYC

After commuting entirely by bicycle on Tuesday, yesterday I took the more genteel option by riding to the nearest commuter rail station:

Traveling in this fashion saves me no time over the subway, and indeed I still have to take the subway to Brooklyn once I get to Grand Central. However, I do get to enjoy comfy seats and a pleasant river view for awhile:

And the short and fairly bucolic ride to and from the station is a nice little bonus:

Riding all the way to Brooklyn takes me considerably longer than either the subway or the premium subway/commuter rail combo, which is why I’m no longer doing it regularly. I could of course close or erase that gap completely buy utilizing one of those new electrically-assisted bicycles everybody’s talking about, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. I mean, I absolutely get while other people do it (I got passed by probably hundreds of them on Tuesday), and objectively it makes perfect sense. However, we all have our turn-ons and turn-offs when it comes to how we get around, and if I’m going to ride to work I want to do it on a bicycle that excites me and not an appliance. Otherwise I’d rather just take the train where I can read and not worry about the weather.

I’ll also admit that e-bikes annoy me. Mostly this is just me being petty, but I do think that they mix even more poorly with pedestrians than regular bicycles do (people on regular bikes at least stop for pedestrians occasionally), and I also think they mix poorly on bike lanes and paths with regular bikes. At times, as someone who rides regular bikes exclusively, I even find myself thinking we should remove e-bikes from the mix entirely, before they remove us, which is where things seem to be going. However, as I’ve pointed out before, when it comes to transportation, at no point in the history of humankind have we collectively opted for the slower option that requires more physical effort. It’s foolish not to reconcile ourselves to this, so as a pragmatist I’m not about to join an anti-e-bike rally or anything like that:

Behold, the “majority:”

Granted, the turnout would suggest otherwise:

But one should never underestimate the power of a dozen:

Andrew Cuomo certainly isn’t:

According to the article, e-bikes “caused 75% of bicycle-related deaths:”

This sound scary until you consider that we don’t really know the total percentage of bicyclists who are riding e-bikes now. E-bikes weren’t even a thing when the city started building bike lanes in earnest, and now they’re ubiquitous. So of course they will continue to comprise a higher and higher percentage of total bicycle deaths until our old-timey pedal-powered bikes seem as antiquated as the pennyfarthing.

At the same time, I’m willing to believe that e-bikes are meaningfully more dangerous, because as the Citi Bike fleet became increasingly electrified and faster, deaths seemed to increase. Here’s an excerpt from a column I wrote for Outside that I’m not sure they ever published because they seem to be imploding:

…prior to 2023 Citi Bike deaths had been exceedingly rare. When I reached out to Citi Biki via social media, they told me that the company makes much of its data public, but what they sent me does not seem to include information regarding fatalities. When I followed up to ask about fatal crashes, they replied, “We are unable to provide the figures you are requesting.”

However, as a cycling New Yorker who pays close attention to news reports of the deaths of other cyclists, I can distinctly recall five prior to 2023. The first Citi Bike death occurred in 2017, four years after the program’s launch in 2013. Moreover, while all these five pre-2023 deaths were tragic, it’s worth noting two occurred under extraordinary circumstances: one was among the victims of the 2017 truck terrorist attack, and another was in 2021 when the victim was riding on a motor vehicle highway in the early morning hours for unknown reasons. 

Again, I must stress I’m relying on memory and Internet research here, but if my numbers are correct, that’s five Citi Bike deaths across a span of nine years—followed by four deaths in 2023 alone, including comedian Kenny DeForest, who died in an apparent solo e-Citi Bike crash. 

So what changed? Well, Citi Bike trips have increased five-fold since the program debuted, which could certainly be a factor. Furthermore, the increase in ridership was notably steep between 2022 and 2023. 

But 2022 was also the year Citi Bike introduced the latest electric bikes, which reached pedal-assisted speeds of up to 20mph. As Time Out noted at the launch, “the extra jolt of power we got when we peddled [sic] was surprising.” And all four of the Citi Bike riders who died in 2023 were riding electric bicycles. 

Again, maybe meaningless because deaths increased along with an increase in ridership, but ridership has been increasing steadily since the program began, so maybe not.

And in New York City, e-bikes are just a part of the massive proliferation of small motorized vehicles in general. For years now, old-fashioned motor scooters (or what Streetsblog likes to call “mopeds”) have been plaguing the bike lanes, but now their riders can finally use the roadway on the Queensboro Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge:

This will create “a more accessible and connected city while maintaining safety for all road users:”

Wait. So if you were riding a gas-powered motor scooter, which is basically a motorcycles and has always required registration and a license plate, you weren’t allowed to ride them in the roadway? Really???

That can’t be right, can it?

Meanwhile, out in the country, apparently people are just riding e-bikes into the wilderness and stranding themselves:

She had to push her bike for 20 miles before she was found:

Perhaps someone should invent a bicycle without a battery that can be ridden for 20 miles.

Nah, it’ll never catch on.